The Death of an American Community/ My County is Dying as I Ride By

[KoKo]

The Death of an American Community by johndamos | February 6, 2010 My county is dying. As I ride
by.... johndamos | February 6, 2010

My county is dying. As I ride to Spartan Express gas station to get my 5 gallons of gas for my pickup, I notice that the readout on the Citgo gas pump has been vandalized, and the pumps are bent and beat up. A few years ago, the Hugo Chavez-Venezuela gas station and its pumps were kept in pristine condition.

I gas up and drive to Biscuit King, a locally owned restaurant where a senior like me can buy one egg on toast and cup of decaf for $3.87. As I leave, I note the large factory that used to produce fine quality Henry Link furniture sitting empty with vines growing through its massive rusting roof. There is one old beat up pickup sitting in the parking lot behind a chain link fence…security guard. I drive past a couple of houses, and stop at a new pawn shop that has just opened on this side of town. I walked in the other day and discovered a vintage 1966 Fender Musicmaster guitar for $55.00. These things are super collectable and this one was in beautiful shape.

I leave the Pawn Shop and head to the Goodwill Store. We have a rather good situation for bargain shoppers with lots of quality used merchandise, but few people with much money to buy…so it’s a buyer’s market right now, but that will change real soon as the quality merchandise is sold off and worn out. Right now, there are lots of consumer shoppers doing the same thing I’m doing for my family…hoarding for a time when there will be no more available at a price I can afford.

I move through the furniture and appliances first, scoping out things…looking for antiques or needed or unusual high quality things I don’t have already. A couple of months ago, I found a beautiful oak and walnut Victorian table in mint condition for $20. There are quite a few beautiful, new-looking Singer and other brand sewing machines available, but my wife or nobody I know sews anymore except the Mexican immigrant ladies who grab up the good machines quickly and take them home, or send them to families in Mexico and South America.

I go to the clothing racks. Wife and daughter have given me a card with their sizes so I shop for high quality items that don’t show much wear. I recently bought two Agner purses for $5.00 for each of them and both of my ladies have closets full of brand name clothing. I’m presently looking for a Prada purse for wife because she loves the movie, “Devil Wears Prada.” Some of the rich ladies change $300 to $1000 purses and clothing as often as they go shopping, and they donate their used stuff to charities for hubby’s tax writeoffs. As I leave Goodwill, I note the Mid-State-Tile plant that is closed…overgrown lawns and rusting roofs…went to Mexico first and then on to China…once employed over 1000 workers and paid good wages and benefits.

-snip-
The chain restaurants are still flourishing where the interstate crosses, but the uptown privately owned restaurants are already closed or have scaled back until they close at 7:00 in the evening because of a lack of business. A few Mexican shops that specialize in ethnic foods or goods have opened, but these are limited. Everywhere, empty factories and buildings sit idle…factories that once kept this place alive and employed directly or contributed to the employment of at least 10,000 people in our county.

more at...

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/26614

[niyad]

1. off to greatest with you

[rurallib]

2. I was telling my brother just today about the small Iowa towns

I have been to recently help a friend campaign for senate.
We usually go by a Walmart on the edge of town. Then we go through residential sections that are slowly running down - pieces of siding missing, sidewalks cracked etc. No money to repair them
Then we go through a downtown section with half the store fronts empty. Eventually we go buy what was once the major employer in town, but is not a rotting shell. It is almost like a cancer that has spread far and wide.

[Bobbieo]

3. Does anyone know if ALCOA Aluminum is still in Massena, NY?

That is where I was a "mental" lathe operator during WW2 amd worked my way into the U of AZ muchos anos pasados.

[dixiegrrrrl]

4. Our small rural southern town is showing the strain also.

Holes in the road go un-repaired.
Vanity Fair mill is closing down, it once kept 3 generations fed and clothed and housed, but little by little the various sections of the mill have closed and been sent out of country.
The last of the mills, the dye plant actually, announced it is closing.
6 timber related mills closed last year, 2 said it was "temporary" but last week announced permanent closure.
Many houses have sat with "for sale signs" for over a year now.
People desperate to sell have tried to rent them out, no takers.
Occupied houses are going unpainted.
Taco Bell closed.
Ford dealership has about 1/4 of the cars on the lot it used to have, most of the vehicles there now are new trucks.
The thrift store is not a bargain at all.
Half the things in it need to go straight to the dump, nothing there is of any value, because people in small towns in the South do not throw away much.
Unlike the good pickings at big city thrift stores I have been in.

We had one Animal Control person, she was let go 6 mos. ago.

We are close to a main road leading into town, and are familiar with the traffic flow.
The road is noticeably quieter during "rush hour" and on the weekends hardly any traffic.

We have heard much more gunfire during hunting season.

Our "official" unemployment rate is 24%, it was announced.
There is of course no way to measure the real rate, nor to measure the large number of people who have worked several jobs being self employed as general fix-it types, they usually have 4-5 different things going to bring in money.
for instance our roofer also builds a spec house a year, rents out a plot of land for hunting parties, raises a few head of beef cattle ( we buy half of one every fall) etc.
There is not measuring how he is "unemployed" when one by one his "side jobs" dry up.
And there are dozens of people like him.

[knitter4democracy]

9. Same up here in Michigan.

So many areas in our nation are dying.

[cutlassmama]

5. Sad, yet excellent piece about the dying of little towns in America. The

big picture is that ALL the cities are dying, but the little towns are being hit the hardest.

[Igel]

6. I watched my childhood community die.

It was working class. The local industry employed 35k people in 1965. In 1977 when I graduated high school it was down below 10k and declining quickly. The president spoke glowingly of the "post-industrial society"--something I thought utterly insane, but the president wasn't working class and thought everybody going to college and being information workers was a grand and glorious thing. Smart president, but a fool. The company tried a last-ditch effort to upgrade its infrastructure. My fellow high school graduates had counted on getting jobs with their C-average non-college-track high school curricula. Of a few hundred students, 4 of us went to college straight out of high school--two of those to community college.

It wasn't pretty.

When I was in college the company closed up. It had a few hundred employees, security guards. When I graduated college in '81 the high school had discontinued its foreign languages. It had become a "junior-senior high" because high school enrollment was down so low they could move local 7-8th graders in. Most of the houses were owned by retirees and the unemployed.

I went back a couple of years later. The community had un-died. It had gone from working class to being a middle-class bedroom community--housing prices had fallen and people had snapped up the houses and moved in with their youngish families. The school taught Latin and French, taught calculus for the first time in 20 years, and had become an environmental magnet school. A year or two later the junior high moved out from the high school building. Over 50% of the graduates went to college by '85; a few years after that the numbers edged up and in the early 2000s over 80% of the high school grads went to college.

The area was close enough to Baltimore to be a bedroom community. It's maintained its status pretty well since then. I don't know anybody there anymore and haven't for over a decade.

[dixiegrrrrl]

7. Thank you for what you posted.

You reminded me that sometimes dying communities do get re-generated.
My hometown did, exactly like yours. It all but died after the paper mills closed ( West coast town) but later became a bedroom community, grew back during the 70's,
but no way could I afford a house anywhere in the county after that.
So maybe there is hope for some places, after this.
Maybe.

[earth mom]

8. We've had factories close in the area and the people who owned the house across the street

have moved out seemingly overnight and the house is now sitting empty with a For Sale sign on it.

We wonder where they are living because without going into details, we know there is no way the people who lived there are paying 2 mortgages right now.

Our family has personally been untouched by the economic downturn but seeing it right across the street is like a kick in the gut. :yoiks: